Jessie Brennan

Artist Biography - Jessie Brennan

Jessie Brennan is a professional artist who exhibits nationally and internationally. Her practice primarily employs drawing, painting and printmaking. She graduated from the Royal College of Art with MA Printmaking in 2007 and has won several awards including the Augustus Martin Prize and MAN Group Drawing Prize. She is currently a tutor in Drawing at Thames Valley Universit...y, and runs a number of drawing workshops at London galleries including Camden Arts Centre, Pump House Gallery and Bishopsgate Institute.

Jessie was funded to continue professional development this year, enrolling on the Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching at CLTAD. She is currently working towards her first solo exhibition at Brook Gallery, which opens in February 2009. Forthcoming projects include a commission by Art on the Underground for which Jessie will produce work with communities at Southwark station, London, in Spring 2009.

Jessie’s practice is storytelling without endings. Using drawing (including printmaking and painting) she constructs open narratives made from sources as diverse as memory, imagination, collaged photocopies and drawings, found photographs, internet imagery, life and the people she knows. The work exists, like the snap shot, as an intimate vision of a partly made-up partly remembered scenario.

Drawing is fundamental to Jessie: it is about ways of looking and understanding. Printmaking, an extension of drawing, is a vehicle for the unexpected and within each stage of the print process a discovery is made. There is honesty and vulnerability in drawing but also a raw and graphic quality that resonates with her subjects: an intimate crowd at a burial, young girls in confirmation dresses, boys in uniform, or a child bathing. Within each image an intimate encounter awaits us and there is the proposition that we re-look. Human relationships, female sexuality, reality, fantasy, memory, loss and mortality are recurring themes within the work. Here, in the picking and mixing of drawn assemblages, is an attempt to (re)present ambiguity: to propose the familiar and knowing only for that process to become undone. And in so doing all things shifting are uncovered, the uncertain exposed.